Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism

From the publisher

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States, yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely undocumented. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words-eloquent and personal oral histories of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Taken together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted an apartheid in American industry. Rather than seeing the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 60s, Michael Honey relates the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.

"[An] eloquent history.... Honey serves as a symphony conductor, skillfully blending the voices of black rubber workers, garbage men, domestics and other laborers into a powerful choir singing a song of freedom."
--Dallas Morning News